You had to feel for Jackie Oates. Newly married and with a splendid new album, The Spyglass & the Herringbone, and a shiny new band to take it to the populace, she must have jumped at the chance to play a showcase at one of London’s most historic churches. But after the van broke down on the M40 and they eventually arrived at the gig aboard an AA tow truck, a dubious PA had the velvet-voiced Oates sounding like she was singing through a watering can. Many of the lyrics and most of the stage banter were obscured in the telling.

Of all the younger singers influenced by Shirley Collins, Oates is perhaps the one who most shares the gentle informal delivery that was such a key ingredient of Collins’s grace and charm. It’s a shame that, here at least, this was sometimes swallowed by the struggle to impart the stories – lithe adaptations of traditional ballads, enlightened arrangements of familiar folk material including Sweet Nightingale and even a spritely cover of the Sundays’ Can’t Be Sure – in the context of an enterprising, but sometimes overbearing, five-piece band.

Yet there was still bountiful evidence of what makes Oates such a treasured ingredient of the modern British folk scene. John Parker’s bowed bass contributed greatly to a tender treatment of Bill Caddick’s lullaby Waiting for the Lark; an ingenious rhythmic barrage whipped along persuasively behind the Cornish song Robber’s Retreat; and her delivery of heavier material such as The Yellow Bittern and Take This Letter to My Mother was genuinely affecting. Nigel Eaton’s arrival to add his vigorous hurdy-gurdy to the finale was a welcome bonus.

Oates has an intimacy that has much in common with the old singers who carried forward much of the traditional material she now plays with such obvious relish. When that is allowed to the fore, she shines.

• At Exeter Phoenix, 26 May. Box office: 01392 667080. At the Forge, Basingstoke, 29 May. Box office: 01256 844244. Then touring until 5 June.